Jack Montague, the former Yale basketball captain who was expelled last month after a university panel found he had sex with a female student without consent, was in attendance for the Bulldogs’ NCAA tournament game in Providence on Thursday afternoon, the Yale Daily News reported.

Montague was seated two seats down from team faculty liaison Stephen Pitti, master of Ezra Stiles College, one of Yale’s 12 undergraduate residential colleges, the student newspaper tweeted minutes before tip-off of the school’s first NCAA tournament appearance since 1962.

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He was no doubt happy with the outcome: Yale won 79-75 over Baylor at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center, a stunning upset and the long-moribund program’s first ever post-season victory.

A national prominence rare in the program’s 120-year history has been overshadowed by the expulsion of Montague, a shooting guard who had started in all of the team’s first 20 games and averaged 9.7 points.

After his dismissal on 10 February, Montague’s former teammates wore gray T-shirts with “YALE” spelled backwards in inverted letters on the front and Montague’s uniform number and nickname, “Gucci”, on the back for a nationally televised game against Harvard, prompting a campus-wide uproar at the prestigious Connecticut university.

This week Montague’s lawyer Max Stern said the 22-year-old “intends to sue” the university over his dismissal, saying his client had become a “whipping boy” for Yale’s past behavior regarding campus sexual assault.

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“We strongly believe that the decision to expel Jack Montague was wrong, unfairly determined, arbitrary, and excessive by any rational measure,” Stern said.

The Bulldogs have now gone 8-1 without Montague, finishing the regular season with a 22-6 record and winning the school’s first Ivy League championship since the Kennedy administration. They deflected questions on their former captain throughout the build-up to Thursday’s game.

“I’ve been a head coach at Yale for 17 years. This is the first time we’ve made the tournament since (1962). We are one of the best defensive teams in the country. We are one of the best rebounding teams in the country,” Yale coach James Jones said on Wednesday. “So I think that’s a great story. And I’d like to tell that one going forward.”

Added senior forward Justin Sears: “I really can’t comment on the Jack situation specifically, but like I’ve said before basketball is a sanctuary. We go to one of the hardest academic schools in the country, and when we step on the court all the outside distractions are gone.”

A request for comment from university spokesman Thomas Conroy was not immediately returned.